As part of the 5.5 release of Chorus we have focused on the internationalisation of the system. This involves a change to the display of some values to ensure consistency and also to allow use of Chorus in other countries. Dates, distances and numbers are now all formatted in a consistent localised format. (e.g. you will see these values in UK format if that is your location).
For example, users will now see the date in their timezone (e.g. for the UK this is dd/mm/yyyy) and in addition the time zone of where the user is, will be recorded on all times (e.g. “27/01/20 09:30:00” will become “27/01/20 09:30:00 GMT” etc). Numbers will also be displayed in a specific way depending on the users location (e.g. for the UK in the format 1,234.56 etc) and the number of decimal places being consistent (e.g. the UK default is now 3 decimal places for all values except lat/longs which are 6 decimal places etc). For distance measurements these will now specify the unit (e.g. in the UK this will be metric). This should make the Chorus outputs clearer to understand. Of note, these changes are display changes only – there is no change in how we process these values.
We have also made some changes to the way we clean and present entities – local telephone numbers will now also be presented in local format, and non-local numbers in international format (e.g. with the relevant county code etc). Previously, ‘local’ was defined via country code. We have amended this so that this is defined via country. This was done to handle distinct countries that share a single country code (for example, the Isle of Man and UK share a country code but are not the same country). For a UK user they will see UK numbers in a local format (e.g. without the country code) but any non-UK numbers in standard internationalised format (conforming to E.164). For example, the number would appear +447777123456, but in local (UK) format this number would be 07777123456.
We anticipate the 5.5 version being available to you all in the next few weeks but will update you closer to its release date.
If you have any queries please contact the support team at [email protected] or call 020 3597 7350.
Thanks
The Chorus Team